Fliers Can Make Miracles for Families of Missing Children

WASHINGTON (May 27) -- As Abby Potash pecked away at the computer in anguish, sending out messages asking for help finding her 10-year-old son, who had been abducted by his father, in another home a woman she didn't know scanned the mail and asked for some reading glasses.

The woman was looking at a flier from the "Have You Seen Me?" program to find missing children, and she recognized her cousin. Outraged that he would kidnap his son, Sam Fastow, she picked up the phone.

For Potash, it was a glimmer of hope in what would turn out to be an eight-month ordeal that -- 13 years later -- she still can't fully describe.

"I don't know if there are words for that much pain," said Potash of Philadelphia, now head of a program for families at the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which sponsors "Have You Seen Me?" along with the U.S. Postal Service and Valassis, the company that prints the Red Plum fliers showing photos of abducted children.

The program participants held a news conference in Washington today in honor of National Missing Children's Day and to mark 25 years of the "Have You Seen Me?" program.

Fastow and Potash were among several families reunited by the fliers that flutter onto kitchen tables by the millions across the country, sometimes ignored but sometimes leading to miracles.

"The 'Have You Seen Me?' program saves lives," said Fastow, now 23, who recently graduated from Temple University. "It makes heroes. It only takes one person to recognize a child."

Potash's hero is her ex-husband's cousin, whom she calls every year on the anniversary of her son's homecoming. The ex-husband had cashed in his son's college fund, changed their names and moved the boy from New Jersey to Texas. When he ran out of cash, he called his cousin, thinking she wouldn't know about the abduction.

But because of the flier, she did. The father was arrested. And Fastow got to reclaim his name, his mother and his life.

He's one of 149 children found directly as a result of the "Have You Seen Me?" program. Another is Krystel Bondello, now 21. When she was 5, her father told her that her mother and all her mother's family had died. He changed their names and they moved to California.

Then one day a babysitter was taking care of Krystel when a flier arrived with the girl's picture.

Krystel's mother, Toni Antionetta, had been through a rough two and a half years searching for her. Recalling that time in an interview with AOL News, she showed the scar on her wrist from a suicide attempt.

When the FBI called and told her to get on a plane to California to pick up her child, she was shaking. When she got off the plane and saw her daughter, Krystel pushed her away.

" 'Break my heart' were not the words for it," said Antionetta, a screen printer who attended today's news conference with her daughter.

In addition, Antionetta had to deal with a Pennsylvania legal system reluctant to prosecute parents for abduction. But that has changed, according to Ernie Allen, head of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Now all states have laws to prosecute parents who abduct children despite court custody orders.

The center serves as a clearinghouse of information on missing children and presses for more attention on the issue. Of the children whose cases are reported to the center, 97 percent are recovered, compared with 60 percent in 1990, Allen said.

Allen said the mandatory waiting periods that once thwarted recovering children now are gone. Today the Amber Alert program publicizes the most dangerous situations. Although most abductions are by parents or other people the child knows, in the cases of stranger abductions, time is crucial.

"We now know in the most serious cases ... in three-quarters of the cases the child is dead within the first three hours. So you have to move fast," Allen said.

Michael Langeman, FBI supervisory agent with the Crimes Against Children Unit, said public awareness of child abduction issues is much higher now. The public has a better understanding that parental abductions can be criminal matters. And for stranger-abduction cases, the FBI has a rapid-deployment team of specialists.

Langeman urges people who see something amiss with a child to contact the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children instead of trying to intervene, because the abductor might just flee again.

Olga Koutina isn't sure who helped find her son Daniel Pearsall, now 10. His father picked him up from day care and never looked back. Koutina, a registered nurse, went to his house and found it empty.

Four months later, just before Christmas, her son was was found in Mexico. He arrived back at the Pittsburgh airport dressed in his Mexican school clothes. "Daniel was touching my face because he was told I was dead," Koutina recalled.

The transition for him, as for Bondello, was difficult. Koutina said he was traumatized and lashing out at classmates at school. But after five years and some therapy, he was flitting about after today's news conference, all dimples and long blond hair, collecting white ribbon stickers aimed at keeping the story of missing children alive.

Allen said the premise behind the fliers is simple: "Somebody knows where these kids are." This week, a flier with the faces of 25 missing children is being delivered to 44 million homes.

He urged people to follow the lead of a 5-year-old Texas girl who saw a flier with the photo of a cute classmate she had been admiring. Even when her mother insisted it couldn't be the same person, she persisted, and it turned out he had been abducted from Michigan.

Allen said the girl later said she pushed so hard because if "I was ever missing, I'd want someone to look at my picture."